Dialogue and the “miracle of language”: the early and late Bakhtin

Abstract This essay begins with a brief account of the French linguistic structuralism and very briefly some aspects of the post-structuralist critique of it, here represented by Lacan and, Deleuze, and Guattari as a response to it. Against this backdrop, the purpose of the essay is to show a critique of structuralism that came earlier than the post-structuralist one, namely that of the Russian philosopher of the dialogic speech and literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin in the 1920s. The concept of the dialogical word has had a major influence in cultural semiotics, literary – and film studies and existential psychotherapy. A second purpose of this essay is to briefly show in what way the ethics of the dialogical word is important in the latter, in existential psychotherapeutic work. Translations from Swedish and French are mine.